Sparks fly in this fiery attempt to deconstruct Muhammad and erase Islam, if readers believe that fire can burn.
Pressburg attempts to debunk Islam and its founder, Muhammad.
Originally written in German and titled Good Bye Mohammed, (2009) this pseudonymous English translation exemplifies several recent books whose express purpose is to degrade Islam. Pressburg’s book uses linguistics, history and textual analysis to depict Islam as a belief system made from whole cloth. In fact, Pressburg contends that the Prophet Muhammad never even existed. For his linguistic disputation, Pressburg relies on the work of Christoph Luxenberg, who suggests that the Quran was not written in Arabic but in Syro-Aramaic, an early Christian language. From this perspective, Pressburg contends that the 72 virgins promised to male martyrs in paradise are merely a mistranslation of 72 shiny grapes. Using the same translation, Pressburg interprets the word muhamad to be a general honorific referring to Christ, not to a specific man of that name. “There is no doubt,” Pressburg says, “that the term muhamad did not refer to a person but that it was used to denote a title.” Early on, Pressburg also asserts Muslims were in fact only Christians. Such statements do little to establish this work as a piece of objective scholarship; rather, the aim is to erase Muhammad and Islam from history in an argument that, at its core, seems to harbor a deep-seated loathing and rejection of Islam. The warped narrative barely disguises this repugnance behind a facade of reasonable discourse that, despite its less-than-robust nature, actually makes for an intriguing read.
Sparks fly in this fiery attempt to deconstruct Muhammad and erase Islam, if readers believe that fire can burn.Pub Date: June 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468129038
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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